


like the ashes of ash

by sharkfights (feartown)



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Fix-It, Flashbacks, but its just cersei i just have to SAY it, can't believe in this economy i am writing heterosexual shenanigans, canon divergent after 8x4, i love the stupidest lannister :(, jaime and brienne are a lesbian couple and i will not hear arguments for otherwise, minor jon/tormund
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-25
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-03-17 01:48:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18955468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feartown/pseuds/sharkfights
Summary: Jaime, before, and Brienne, after.--fix-it set after 8x4.





	1. part i

**Author's Note:**

> while i would dearly enjoy denying i am in any way a part of game of thrones fandom, a show i have managed to get back into in TWENTY NINETEEN, it seems i've written a whole fanfiction about jaime and brienne?? there's almost 10k of this nonsense. 10k that could have gone on my manuscript and i would be 10k closer to the 30k i need to /finish my manuscript/. i don't know if you can tell how much i hate myself but i truly wish i would slap my own face for being such a stupid ass bitch
> 
>  
> 
> on a nice note this fic would not exist without kat who is the kind of writing partner you DREAM of, if you dream of these sorts of things, and also i believe it is very rude of that forest witch hozier to write a song specifically about jaime and brienne when i have done nothing but support and value him

* * *

 

 

Brienne of Tarth has never had to do anything special in order to leave a memorable impression on someone.

If her size hadn’t been enough, her claim as sole heir to the entire island of Tarth has always made her more interesting than she’s ever desired. 

No man thought himself too old or too decrepit; too loose in his mind to court her, and the memories of it still roil in her stomach like sickness. Being polite to those who have looked at her with piggish lust in their eyes, or even just the look that tells her they think less of her than other women -- it’s hurt her worse than any wound that has ever been opened on her body. 

When she started to tower over the other girls and they began to laugh at her for it, Brienne learned to make herself harder than steel. When she donned armour for the first time, she already knew what it felt like, because she had been wearing it against the japes of men and girls for years. 

Only Renly; only the man with a just and gentle hand who was so floral in his kindness to her, had made a dent. Renly, who smiled at her without pity or jeering! Who brought her into his guard because he saw what it meant to her. He had not  _ wanted _ anything, and a man not wanting anything from her was more novel than Brienne could bear.

But then Renly died with his blood coating her hands, and even though it wasn’t her killing blow that struck him she felt as guilty as if it had been. 

Even after Jaime, she still doesn’t believe that it’s possible for men and love to coexist. Not in the same place. Not for her.  

She’s certain Jaime’s life here without Cersei is dark and cold. It has to be. Despite his presence in her room at night, the solid weight of him next to her she thinks there’s going to have to be a moment. Some flame that has been burning in him will be extinguished and he’ll retreat to safety, back into the folds of his family; all their wealth and power and bitter cruelty. 

Maybe he will winter her like a season, and when the snows melt he’ll be gone back to his summer sister as quickly as the winds blowing south from the Wall. 

In her heart Brienne is sure of two things: the North is uninhabitable, and so is she.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Jaime Lannister had learned from a young age that a memorable impression counted.

His captor might be utterly humourless and roughly the size of a supply ship, but she was still human. And that meant she had an opinion about him.

“You wouldn’t consider it even for one night?” He asked one afternoon. The rain had been falling for hours, heavy and miserable. “I’ve been sleeping in a pen for a year and we’ve been traipsing the breadth of Westeros for a week. I want to sleep under a  _ roof _ .”

“Why would I care where you’ve been sleeping, Kingslayer?”

“Well, winter, as they say,  _ is _ coming,” Jaime offered. “I’m only in these rags and I’d wager you’ll get a lot colder welcome in Kings Landing if you only show up with my corpse.” 

He watched the way her eyes narrowed as she tried to figure out if he was tricking her. 

“You aren’t going to die of  _ exposure _ ,” she said after a moment. There was a fair amount of scorn in her voice -- but then, he reasoned, she said everything to him with a fair amount of scorn in her voice. 

He could tell she was thinking about it, though. She had to be as sick of the damp leaching through her clothes as he was, the way it made them chafe under her armour. Even someone as gristle-tough and stubborn as Brienne had to have the want of a roof over her head and straw under her back for one night. 

Jaime tried to make his walk look as stooped and pained as possible as they continued walking. He could almost  _ hear _ Brienne thinking, the two sides of her arguing over whether it was weak to give in to what he was asking.

It was almost half an hour later that she answered him.

“There is an inn less than a day’s walk from here. If you behave yourself, we shall stop there the night.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


The more time that passes; days trickling slowly into a week, then two, Brienne realises something. Jaime is not  _ good _ at that many things. Her face may redden when she remembers how good he is at  _ some _ things, but he has still lived most of his life before her as a sword-hand; a fighter. Kingslayer. 

There is a marked difference between the Jaime she smuggled out of a pen in the Whispering Wood and the Jaime who lives here -- impossibly, with her at Winterfell -- though. It’s not just that his face is older, or that he insults her less. The difference is that this Jaime  _ wants _ to be good at things. Other than being a knight, other than being charming and irritable and arrogant; he wants to learn something new. 

She watches him when she hopes he isn’t looking. They are doing what comes after the battles, the things people like Jaime have never had to deal with as they sat high in their gilded towers. Finding wood for pyres. Comforting the grieving. Mending the bones of the places that kept them safe. 

They’re things Brienne has seen all her life. She’s been lucky to see them because it means she’s survived, but she can tell that thoughts like this have only just been born in Jaime’s mind. 

She imagines him on the battlefield, surrounded by blood and smoke. She imagines him waiting for garlands and gratitude from those he saved from certain death, or whatever heroism he thought he was performing. Golden and ruthless, and so far from the man he is now that she’s sure he wouldn’t recognise himself in a mirror. 

As they rebuild Winterfell, Brienne realises Jaime Lannister is trying to rebuild himself. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


The more time they spent trudging along together, the more Jaime found himself  _ wanting _ to make conversation with Brienne. With concern, he noticed it was less to get a rise out of her, and more because he wanted to see what lay beyond the mirthless facade she kept up so diligently around him.

“You shouldn’t loop the rope like that,” he said, trying to keep an idle tone while watching with interest her white-knuckled grip on his makeshift leash. 

Brienne looked slowly between his face and the rope circled around her fingers like he was mad.

“Do they not teach horsemanship on Tarth?” Jaime continued. He stopped their joyless slog through the undergrowth of backwater wherever the hell for a moment, enjoying the sour frown she gave him even as she stopped walking herself. It really was too easy to provoke her.

Awkward as it was in his shackles, Jaime managed to get a hold on the slack of rope between them, running it through his fingers -- not pulling, to make her react and end his game, but to draw her focus.

“There was a stable boy when I moved to Kings Landing; I watched him bring in a young horse that was to be broken for King Robert to take hunting. It was half wild still and hated the city, and the boy led it with the ropes looped like yours around his hand.”

Brienne didn’t move as he took a step towards her, the rope pleasantly rough between his fingers as he made a loop around his own hand. 

“The horse spooked, of course, at a stray cat or a shadow on the wall or the ghosts those beasts see wherever they choose. Spooked and bolted…” Jaime stepped back and let the rope come taut around his fingers, “...and took most of his hand with it.”

Brienne looked vaguely disgusted and then rolled her eyes as he gave a few experimental tugs, as if half-expecting his own hand to deglove itself like the stable boy’s.

“I hardly think you have the strength of a bolting horse, Kingslayer,” she said dismissively, “Especially wrapped in chains.”

“Ah,” Jaime replied, showing his teeth, “But I rather think I have the stamina of one. Would you care to find out?”

There it was, again, that moment where he could swear he was probing a chink in her armour, where the tip of his sword was finding the yield of fabric and flesh. He was  _ amusing _ her, and it was shocking to learn that he wanted to do it again. 

At least, he wanted to do it again until he found his feet unceremoniously kicked out from under him, the wind knocked from his lungs as though someone had stepped on a bellows. 

Brienne’s wide head and shoulders loomed above him like a mountain peak against the grey sky.

“ _ Don’t _ start that again.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Brienne finds that even without the imminent threat of an icy death that she wants to make time to spar with Arya again. Whenever they circle each other, swords swinging, Brienne is thrilled by the way the girl flickers in and out of her vision like a ghost; eyes as bright as the winter around them.

She knows that Jaime watches her when he comes across them. She tries not to let it rattle her.

One morning when Brienne is puffing with the weight of her armour, muscles in her arms humming with effort, she barely jumps back in time as Arya twists towards her and jabs, causing Brienne to stumble. Which is exactly what Arya wants. With one sweeping movement, the girl ducks and lunges forward -- if she were to deliver an actual blow, Brienne’s legs would be bloody and the fight would be done. 

Brienne yields, then gets distracted by the figures not far from them. Sansa has joined Jaime where he’s leaning with his elbows on a hitching post, and his gaze is ripped from Brienne’s as he realises who now stands next to him.

Infuriatingly, she can’t hear what they’re saying, and she’s trying so hard to catch even a word that she misses Arya asking if she wants a round two.

“What?” Brienne asks, in a tone completely unbecoming for a sworn knight. Seven hells, she sounds more like the old Jaime than she does herself.

“I said, do you want to go again?” Arya repeats, looking between Brienne and Jaime. She rolls her eyes, swinging Needle idly in her hand. 

“Oh. Yes, I would, my lady.”

But she can’t concentrate. Her swings are too wide, her stance off-balance, her mind barely attending to the sword in her hand. 

Jaime looks nervous, and it’s still an emotion that she finds it difficult to see him wearing. A contrite Jaime Lannister is a sight to behold; his good hand fiddling with the gold one, eyes cast downward while Sansa stands regally beside him. Gods, she wishes she could tell what they were saying.

“You’re not paying  _ attention _ ,” Arya says, suddenly young again and whining like Brienne isn’t playing her game properly. 

“Sorry, Arya,” Brienne says, and it’s still absent -- she’s forgotten to use the girl’s title. 

“Sansa isn’t going to  _ eat _ him,” Arya says. She’s thrown her sword down now, knowing this isn’t going to go any further with Brienne distracted. “And she’s  _ not _ going to fuck him, so I don’t know what you’re worried about.”

Blushing, Brienne nonetheless marches over to where Jaime and Sansa are talking, and tries to seem like she might have something important to say.

“Ser Brienne,” Sansa says, her smile genuine. Jaime says nothing, just tries to keep a smile off his own face. Damn him for making her face burn even redder.

“Lady Sansa. Is everything… all right?”

Sansa nods. “I was just thanking Ser Jaime for his help with cleaning up the Godswood.”

“You helped clean up the Godswood?” Brienne asks. It comes out more incredulous than she means it to.

“I helped clean up the Godswood,” Jaime replies, smile still playing behind his eyes.

“Right, well now that we know who cleaned up the Godswood,” Arya says from behind them, “Sansa, you’re making it difficult for us to spar in peace.”

The two sisters look at each other the way only sisters can, so Sansa takes her leave, bidding Brienne a soft (and knowing) goodbye. 

“I’ll spar with you, if you take it easy on an aging man with one hand,” Jaime says to Arya, who inclines her head to agree. She is still frosty with him, but there is some trust trickling through the Stark ranks now. After the dead men. After there have been no Lannister soldiers coming to wrest them from their beds in the middle of the night. 

Brienne looks at Jaime and wonders how anyone could mistake him for a Lannister now at all. She’d never met him when he was a lion, golden and cruel. Even after she’d returned him to Kings Landing he’d been robbed of it. And now time has turned him gentle and as grey as the North.

“Please do go easy on him,” Brienne says, and she means it even as she cases the words in a mocking tone.

Jaime does grin at her then, big and wide and delighted by her teasing. As he comes around the hitching post, he hooks his hand under one of her pauldrons and pulls her toward him in one smooth action, kissing her full on the mouth.

Brienne wants to rip his stupid golden hand off and slap him with it for being so brazen in front of everyone. But then, too, his mouth is beautiful and hot and of all the people in Winterfell, he is kissing her.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


They never made it to the inn.

Just outside the gloomy, lice-riddled place Brienne had agreed they could stay for the night, they were ambushed by two mounted Stark soldiers undoubtedly looking for their missing captive and and the Maid of Tarth. 

“Why do you have to be such a conspicuous looking beast?” Jaime asked as she flung him sideways into a nest of shrubs and drew her sword.

Jaime was immediately on his feet again when the two men dismounted their horses and flanked Brienne like they meant to finish her quickly. These Stark men weren’t like those who’d hung the tavern girls; these were soldiers who knew how to fight. Something in him went completely, terribly cold.

“Hey!” Jaime said loudly, stepping into the path of one of the men.

“Make this easy for us, Lannister,” he said, “And we won’t hurt your big pet.”

Jaime could see Brienne’s nostrils flaring. She looked wild the way she had ripping apart the last lot of people who insulted her, and something stirred like an animal inside him at the thought of her doing it again. 

“Oh, she would love you to try,” he said. “She hasn’t been fed in a few days.”

It was jovial, but the men could tell he wasn’t joking. 

The bigger of the two men, the one who had spoken, stepped towards him. The gleam of his sword made Jaime painfully aware of his manacles and lack of armour, and he regretted all the jests he’d ever made. Before he’d had time to collect himself, the man lunged forward.

He was faster than Jaime expected, and he didn’t jump back quite far enough. The soldier’s sword swiped his thigh, leaving a deep gash in the muscle and Jaime fell to the ground. The wound started to well with blood.

Jaime hated blood, truthfully. Hated the look and smell of it after killing Aerys; when he’d stabbed the king it’d felt like his madness had bloomed all over Jaime’s hands.

Brienne lunged at the man who had left his mark on Jaime and he heard the crunch of armour, as well as her heavy grunt of pain and anger as she hit him.

After that it didn’t take her long to make the men into bloody piles of innards. She dragged them further into the forest, off the road, and he knew that the dream he’d been having about a fire to warm him right down to the bone was going to be forsaken. He sighed. It had been a nice dream.

“Are you all right?” she asked him. There was no emotion in it, she might as well have asked him whether he needed to piss, but he was still grateful that she held out a hand and pulled him up by the bar of his manacles. She winced when she did it -- she must have hit that soldier even harder than he thought.

“Are  _ you _ ?”

“I’ll be fine,” she said gruffly. “But we need to get a move on.”

She took her dagger and ripped a length of cloth off one of the saddleblankets the horses were wearing and bound his bleeding leg with it. Efficient and emotionless, just what he liked in a woman.

They couldn’t risk the horses returning to wherever they came from and alerting someone to trouble - Jaime knew he wasn’t going to be fast enough with his wound to outrun any soldiers come to look for their fallen comrades, and he also knew Brienne’s shoulder had to be killing her. She was obstinate about being fine, but he could see from the way she was holding herself that the blow had hurt. 

But Brienne was loathe to kill the kind-eyed creatures all the same, so they took them.

After almost a month of torturous walking, to be heaved up onto the back of a horse felt like being lifted to the heavens by the gods. If the gods were a gruff, brutish woman seemingly intent on thrusting him so far he toppled over the other side of the animal, that is.

Once they agreed he was settled, Brienne tied his shackles to the pommel of his saddle -- he was not given the dignity of holding the reins -- and hauled herself to sitting on the other horse. She took her reins as well as his, but once they started walking he forgot how indignant he was about it because  _ gods _ it was good to be off his feet. They ached in his stirrups; his boots almost worn through from walking so far. 

Jaime knew it would have been easy enough to cause some amount of bother even tied the way he was. It had been a gamble for Brienne to do this, albeit an educated one -- what, truly, would he do if he were able to get away from her? He was still tied to a horse and still the Kingslayer.

And, he realised with embarrassment, thoroughly lost in these godforsaken stretches of wood without her.

 


	2. part ii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i truly don't remember when arya left winterfell in 8x4 or really the timeline of that episode at all? but i am here to tell you i will not rewatch it to find out, so please assume she wants to be jaime and brienne's murderous kid for like, at least a couple of weeks before she fucks off

  


As they walked deeper into Westeros Brienne drew Jaime's horse closer to her own, on her guard both about him and their surroundings after their attack.

Their proximity was such that his leg pressed in sweetly behind the long length of hers, warming against her breeches and the horse’s side. It had been a long time since he’d touched a woman like this, without violence or intention, and it was strange to think that it felt almost… nice.

Repulsed by his own lack of loathing — who would want to be so close to a woman like this? She was too unnaturally strong, maddeningly plain — he let his knee relax, the jut of bone fitting right into the bend of hers.

“So how far back does the giant lineage go on Tarth?” he asked, desperate to stop thinking about how comforting all this was. A year in a pen, alone; he could almost pull the yearning out of himself like a physical thing. A bone, or a bit of his own meat.

“Be quiet, Kingslayer.”

Her terse, bored tone did nothing to stop the yearning, but even so. He couldn’t feel tender towards _Brienne_.

It was somewhere around the fifth or sixth time Brienne asked their horses to risk their sturdy legs by crossing a stream that the laceration in his leg opened up again. It bled only sluggishly, as though his blood was as tired as he was, but with their lack of food and his utter exhaustion it made him feel as light-headed as if it were a new and gushing wound.

Just as he was trying to figure out the best way to tell her they needed to stop or he was going to pass out and topple off his horse, they came across a homestead.

It was small and rambling, no more than three or four rooms total, but it was lived in; smoke rose from the stout chimney; chickens pecked about the yard.

“Who would live all the way out here?” Jaime asked weakly. They were too far east for anyone to be sworn to the Lannisters, he was sure.

“Wendish Town isn’t that far from here,” Brienne replied. Her hand was on the hilt of her sword.

“Wendish Town…” Jaime repeated. “What’s left of it, I suppose. That was under House Darry, was it not?”

“A plowman on a brown field,” Brienne confirmed. She knew her houses as well as he did.

It pained him to know his assertion was right -- it was unlikely anyone who lived in the tiny holding in front of them was going to give him sympathy should they find out who he was.

He looked over at Brienne. She was hunched on her horse, favouring her shoulder far more than she had before. Bizarrely, infuriatingly, he found himself worried for her. They both needed medical attention, and house loyalties aside this was the best place to find it. At the least, whoever lived here might have a needle to sew up his leg.

“We should ask them for help.”

“No,” Brienne said. It was immediate. Predictable. He’d known she wouldn’t hear of it, and he knew he was going to have to trot out the same tired argument to her -- if he died of blood loss, his father would be delivered a corpse instead of his son; she had made an oath to Catelyn Stark; he was _tired_ and his leg was _bleeding_ \--

“But we need to ask them,” Brienne continued, her voice resolute and unhappy.

“Lady Brienne, are we finally in agreement on something?” Jaime asked, faking incredulity.

“Don’t get your hopes up, Kingslayer; it’s not going to happen again.”

She dismounted, untying him from his pommel. With some amount of embarrassment, Jaime realised he was too dizzy to get down off his own horse by himself.

“You’ll have to forgive me for my damsel act, but it seems I’m stuck up here,” he said, trying to conjure up any amount of levity. He was even starting to feel woozy. How utterly quaint of him.

Brienne frowned, thinking he was lying, but when she saw the wet stains on his leg she must have understood, because she grunted and a moment later grabbed his ankle to get his foot out of his stirrup.

The way she helped him off his horse was surprisingly gentle, and he tried not to think about the strength of her hands where they gripped his hip and ribs to make sure he wouldn’t fall.

“We shouldn’t go in there as ourselves,” Jaime mused, slightly less dizzy on the ground. “I can be a pig thief again if you like, or... oh, you could be my _adoring_ wife! And I, a soldier, whom you have lovingly smuggled away from the war and into the forest, where we were viciously attacked by a bear.”

Brienne snorted. “I am _not_ pretending you’re my husband,” she said, as though Jaime hadn’t spent his whole life being followed by tittering women who would have given their maidenhead in a second to say exactly that.

“Betrothed, then,” he continued, apparently delirious. Before five seconds ago he had never entertained the thought of marrying the tall, lumbering woman next to him; her face always set in that unreasonable frown as though her very existence was a chore. He really must have lost a lot of blood. Unintentionally, he thought to himself that she might actually be quite pleasant to look at if she smiled.

A _lot_ of blood.

“You think that’s better?” Brienne asked in an exasperated voice. “Can we not just be two travellers lost after our home was sacked?”

“With you in armour and me in chains?” Jaime replied, just as exasperated. “Yes, very believable.”

He was starting to feel alive again, arguing with her this way, and shook his manacled hands with a little smirk.

“You know you’re going to have to take these off me, or they’re going to ask too many questions.”

“You don’t even know who _they_ are,” Brienne retorted, but Jaime could tell she knew she was beaten. He shook his manacles again -- just enough to truly bother her.

With a resigned sigh, Brienne turned away from him and fumbled in her armour, then turned back around with the key to free him.

“You know if you try to leave me -- or fight me in any way -- that you’ll die.”

She said it so matter of factly Jaime was nodding his head before he even parsed what she’d said to him. She was right, regardless of how he felt about it. And he did want to get home; he wanted back his clothes and his sister and their bed; his controlling father and the heaving smell of the sea and the Red Keep. All of it. However much he might loathe the idea of relying on a woman as sullen and trollish as Brienne of Tarth for this endeavour, he needed her to make it work. He needed her in order to stay alive.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


After Arya trounces Jaime so badly during their spar that he complains for the next three days about not being able to use his arms properly, they’re both out in the training yard with her looking for more.

Brienne had thought there wasn’t much more to learn about sword-fighting. She is good at it, and strong, but even when she watches Jaime try to counter Arya’s attacks she can’t see where they’re coming from. Arya uses fighting the way girls on Tarth used to dance in her youth, all twists and swings and steady footwork -- watching it is just as exhilarating from the sidelines as it is to be the one sparring.

“You shouldn’t move your arm like that,” Arya says out of nowhere, as Jaime fails to block one of her attacks.

He falls back, sword at his side.

“You’re left-handed,” Arya continues, “...now.”

The little smile she gives him is wicked, and Brienne can tell that he wants to bite back at Arya about it, but is still too afraid of her. He can tell as easily as Brienne could that Arya is too slick, too practiced. She doesn’t have to say a word for them to know the Night King was never the first death. She’s left countless bodies behind her, all blood and pulp and bone.

Arya steps forward and takes Jaime’s arm without pretence, turns it on more of an angle.

“You’re stronger there, use it to your advantage.”

“Anything else?” he asks, and there’s a shadow of his old, haughty highborn-voice in it that makes Brienne’s skin prickle.

“Yes,” Arya says flatly. “Don’t think about it so much.”

“Don’t think about what?”

“The hand you don’t have.”

Jaime shakes his head -- in wonderment or mistrust, Brienne isn’t sure -- and adjusts his stance; brings his sword up the way Arya suggests, and they start again.

It doesn’t dawn on her for a while that she’s stopped watching Arya completely now and is instead watching Jaime -- he lunges with ferocity; spins and cuts like the very air will yield to him.

It leaves her breathless to see how much he loves it; the bite of steel against steel is a song that sings to her in the same way, and suddenly it’s almost easy -- it feels _right_ that Jaime is here with her, in the North and the winter and the stone. Suddenly she wants to be as brazen as he was -- throw his sword to the ground, let it blood her hands as she pulls the blade from him. She wants to take his face in her hands and kiss him as soundly as fire kisses wood.

When he looks at her, eyes shining, she thinks he has to know.

He has to know that he, and her, and love, might be starting to coexist.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


They left Brienne’s armour and his shackles in the rotting base of a tree, and walked the horses to the nearby stream. As he revelled in the independent way his freed hands moved while tying his horse to a branch, he caught Brienne staring at him. It was an odd stare, calculating but soft, like it was going to become an emotion but wasn’t quite getting there. Cersei looked at him like that sometimes. When she did, he felt like he would raid every gold mine in Westeros if he thought it would mean she’d look at him like that forever.

Jaime was about to say something, but then Brienne shoved him towards the water -- he caught himself with his hands, just, and managed not to topple face-first into it.

“Wash your face,” she said, and she’d kept her sword on for this so he felt he’d better do as he was told.

Brienne bent herself, wetting a bit of rag before rubbing it roughly over her face, snorting and gurgling and doing quite well to temper any more...amicable feelings he might have been having toward her.

It pained Jaime to kneel and try to reach the water as Brienne had, but she must have seen him struggling. Hauling him back to his feet, she took her still wet hands and the still wet rag and wiped them over his face in one smooth stroke.

Surprised, Jaime didn’t quite know what to do with their closeness. Brienne’s eyes were bluer and brighter than a glacier up close; the lines above her nose deepening as she took the rag to his face again, trying her best to rid him of a year of dirt and grime. If he didn’t think she’d have slapped him, Jaime would have made a joke about the roughness of her hands against his cheek.

“I’m not sure there’s much helping it,” he said instead.

“No, there isn’t.”

Her face was as neutral as Brienne’s face ever had been; her same surly mouth, the determined curve of her brow, but he could tell she was trying for it. Her churlish expressions were usually as natural as her own skin, especially around him. But with her fingers carefully working over his face, her look was as forged as her armour. Interesting.

“Come,” she said as she finished. Jaime’s mind, for a moment, flashed to something entirely other than what she had meant. “If we’re doing this we need to do it now, or I do believe you’re going to bleed to death.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Arya takes her breakfast at the trestles like a common lord rather than one of the ladies of Winterfell, and that is where Brienne starts to find Jaime more and more often. The three -- four, with Pod -- don’t particularly talk. Jaime’s knee bangs against hers as he jigs it, until her hand placed there stills him; they occasionally wonder how far Jon and Daenerys have travelled; Brienne thinks of when she used to sit at tables like this in her father’s castle and wish for more.

She thinks of home because this: the people and the stone walls and wood and smoke, the hearths and snow; they've started to feel like home too. Death has made them wretched and familial and drawn them all together like threads or shards of broken things.

She knows Jaime never got to be a father to his children; that two of them died in front of him; that he held their bodies as they went cold and mourns them still.

Arya Stark is hardly a child -- truthfully, she might be wiser than them all -- but she doesn’t have a father and Jaime has no daughter, so Brienne can see how the two have stitched together; however uneasy their truce may be.

“I’m leaving. Today,” Arya says one morning. She says it without sadness or contempt -- it’s just a fact that she’s presenting, and she expects no argument.

“Where are you going to go?” Brienne asks.

“South,” Arya says, her voice the same.

Brienne looks at Jaime, who shrugs. He’s past telling women what they can and can’t do with themselves. He simply takes a bite of bread and chews it thoughtfully; studies Arya’s calm, impassive face.

“Ser Brienne used to look at me like that,” he says to her.

“She still should,” Arya replies, without a hint of irony.

“What will take you South, my lady?” Brienne asks, jabbing Jaime in the side with her elbow as he chuckles.

“A few years ago when I was younger, and afraid, I made a list. There were three Lannisters on it. Now there’s only one.”

The young Stark looks at them coolly, emotionless, and Brienne realises she means to be the one to kill Cersei. Jaime tenses next to her, and Brienne’s food turns thick and cloying in her mouth. Cersei is one thing they have never spoken of properly but she is always there, however faint her shadow may have become.

Brienne is afraid of what Jaime might say; that their carefully spun web of time together is about to be ripped apart by the one thing she feels Jaime could be compelled to leave her for.

“People have been trying to kill off my family since before I could remember. Very few have succeeded,” Jaime says, his voice level.

“I’m not people,” Arya replies, twirling her fork between her fingers.

“You don’t think there would be someone more suited to the job?”

She knows Jaime is talking about himself, and for a moment Brienne is childishly irritated. Were so many people really plotting to kill Cersei Lannister all this time and she had no idea? She would have offered her sword for the task, if they had bothered to ask her for it.

Brienne gets up from the table and makes to walk behind him, planning on letting the two bicker well into the afternoon about who was going to kill who if they wished -- but Jaime grabs her wrist before she can go past.

“Ser Brienne,” he says, and his fingers slip down to her hand, holding it. Unconsciously, her own fingers tighten around his as he looks up at her. His eyes are soft and worried and Brienne feels her heart in her chest like a rabbit, frantic.

“Don’t apologise,” she says to him, because he shouldn’t, because she couldn’t bear it if he did. Cersei would kill the both of them if she knew how many rooms in Winterfell had witnessed the way he had been touching her since the great battle. His thumb strokes over the back of her hand -- he hasn’t touched her like this, she realises. Not so freely, in front of people whose respect she relies upon. She doesn’t snatch her hand away, though. It's warm, and she doesn't know how much longer she'll have it to hold.

“I have no plans to leave, my lady,” Jaime says. He sounds certain.  _We can't choose who we love_.

She wishes she could believe him.

 

 

 

 

 

There was a woman chopping wood outside the little home as they walked up, her axe coming down in practised, cleaving strokes. Jaime was for a moment reminded of Brienne hacking away the lives of the Stark men they’d met only days after their journey together began, and swallowed hard. The image of her sword lovingly thrust into the meat of the last man had been plaguing him at night, though embarrassingly he wouldn’t consider its presence that of a nightmare.

The woman stopped chopping as they approached, and held the axe loosely in both her hands. It wasn’t an overt threat, but it was a warning.

“Afternoon to you,” the woman said.

“Forgive our intrusion, my lady,” Jaime said, jumping in before Brienne. Had he gone completely mad? “My wife and I are hoping you can help us.”

He felt, rather than heard, Brienne’s furious groan. It was enough to make him bite the inside of his lip to keep from smiling too wide.

“We got robbed on the road a few hours ago, the thieves took almost everything we own and we were lucky that my wife here is so intimidating with a dagger in her hand. We got away with our lives and only a few open wounds that need some care.”

Still openly suspicious, the woman took a few steps toward them to get a look at the gash on Jaime’s leg.

“ _My_ wife is just inside with a crossbow, in case you’re looking to try anything,” the woman said. She was older, with a few years on Jaime, her face serious but not harsh.

Jaime looked over at Brienne, but Brienne gave him no sign that she’d taken in anything the woman was saying. Or not outwardly, anyway. Inside, Jaime knew that she wished she still had her sword on her hip. Idly, he wondered how many other weapons she had stowed away on her person.

“We aren’t looking to try anything, my lady,” Brienne said in her calm, carrying voice. “We would only appreciate a moment to sit by your hearth and tend to our wounds.”

“And eat some food, if you have any,” Jaime couldn’t help but interject.

Brienne looked at him like she could have murdered him then and there, Catelyn Stark be damned, but settled for a glare — one that would have wilted a weaker man like a dying flower. Jaime just smiled.

“Apologies, my lady. My _husband—_ ” the words came out gritty as sand “—has lost a lot of blood and I fear he is becoming delirious.”

The woman studied them both for a moment, taking in their faces and their wounds and seemingly even the air around them. Eventually, she seemed to decide that whoever they were, they weren’t going to kill her.

“My name is Arlis and my wife is Lina. You’re welcome to fix yourselves up inside.”

Before Jaime could give her the names he had brilliantly come up with, Brienne cut in over the top of him.

“Thank you, my lady, we are in your debt. My name is Brienne, and this is Loras.”

She turned and smiled him a perfect, ice-frosted smile at the look of horror on his face. She thought she wasn’t going to play his game anymore, and that she’d won by calling him that stupid curly-haired clown’s name.

She was going to learn that she was wrong.

 


	3. part iii

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Tell me something else. Tell me your secrets,” he says, and something in her burns white hot, twisting in her belly and around her ears. The gravelly, teasing way he says it makes her want to physically writhe under her furs, such is the tenderness of it. Words only for her, said the way words might be said to a willowy beauty like Lady Sansa or a tempestuous queen like Cersei.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in the time between writing the first chapter of this fic and, yknow, now, i've rewatched basically the whole of thrones and it has come to my attention that jon and tormund are... in love? which is to say, nothing about the fic changes except that now you can imagine that my whole life is ruled by the idea that jon snow just wants to be held tenderly in the arms of his husband, tormund giantsbane (who DOESN'T), and i may mention that once or twice. controversial, i know.
> 
> also somehow this story has given itself an extra chapter which is just. great. free me from this prison

Brienne avoids Jaime after she leaves the breakfast table. She watches from the battlements of the castle as Arya rides away without even a look back to her home, then keeps herself busy at Sansa’s side until the sky darkens above them. Sansa says no word about it, but when they’re sitting in the Great Hall that evening she gives Brienne a questioning look as Jaime walks in alone.

He sits next to Tormund, who Brienne believes has forgiven Jaime for “winning” her, as though she’s some kind of prize. Although, she thinks -- given the amount of ravens Tormund receives from Jon Snow -- that he might have won a new prize by now. 

“He doesn’t look much like a Lannister now, does he?” Sansa says, echoing the thoughts Brienne has every time she sees Jaime walking the halls of Winterfell. It hasn’t escaped anyone that he looks closer to the wolves who dwell here than any prowling lion wearing red and gold. This war, the dead, his family -- they haunt him now. 

“You’re right, my lady.”

Sansa regards her with a sidelong glance, still half-focused on Jaime who is now getting thumped heartily on the back by Tormund as he tells an undoubtedly smutty tale to the group gathered around him.

“But?”

Brienne doesn’t know how to answer. It’s not even Lady Sansa’s duty to have to listen to the woes she has about her romantic ties, despite the closeness they’ve developed.

“You’re worried that blood is still the most important thing to him.”

“You don’t think that it is?” Brienne asked. Sansa had heard as well as she that Jaime would kill for his family a thousand times over, that he wouldn’t apologise about the things he had done for love. 

“I think that he loves you, and that is just as important.”

Brienne still can’t make that thought stay in her head. Jaime Lannister, loving her… it spills through her hands like water, impossible to hold onto. Certainly, he respects her. Certainly, he wants her. But loving her is a much more nebulous and terrifying idea, however much she might have been thinking about it since Jaime came to Winterfell. 

It becomes unbearable quickly, the way he keeps glancing at her but doesn’t want to approach, and Brienne eventually takes her leave from Sansa’s side.

She and Sansa both know that Jaime, subtle as an axe to the head, will be soon to follow. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


The women -- Arlis and Lina -- were true to their word, and let Jaime and Brienne into their home to patch themselves up. Lina even stitched his leg back together while Arlis warmed a pot of stew over the fire. 

Still, Jaime could tell that Brienne remained on edge and worried without her armour. He’d followed her gaze when they walked in and saw, as Brienne did, that Lina indeed had a crossbow inside with her. It leaned nonchalantly against the wall, but Jaime did feel a cold prickle at the back of his neck about it. 

It was reckless of them to do this, but as they all sat at the rough-hewn trestle table together he knew it was just as reckless to stay out in the wilds of Westeros, injured and without allies. 

Brienne’s hulking form was warm next to him, and as they ate their stew it was once again abundantly obvious that she’d never had a lick of formal training to be a lady. Even Jaime, growing up in the castles of his family, had learned proper table manners. Which -- he quickly realised -- he shouldn’t be using at this particular table if he wanted to be believed a nobody. More specifically, a nobody  _ husband _ to the woman loudly slurping and wiping her great hand over her mouth next to him with no care in the world. 

“So,” Arlis said pointedly. “What has brought you so far away from the River Road?”

“We eloped,” Jaime cut in before Brienne could finish swallowing her food. “Brienne’s family didn’t approve of our union.”

Brienne, trying not to choke on a large piece of carrot, glowered almost audibly next to him. 

“And you were attacked?” Lina asked.

Jaime’s gaze flickered to Brienne. She wasn’t good at this, not like him. She’d done fine with the Stark men -- men were easier to fool; they took less interest in the nuance of facial expressions and rarely looked for tricks. Women were different. Suspicious. Of course, being a man, he couldn’t blame them. 

“Yes, but it was my fault,” he said cheerfully, and all three women at the table wore identical expressions of surprise. “I provoked them. Bad habit of mine, that.”

“It is,” Brienne agreed, finally able to chime in with something she actually believed. 

Arlis and Lina shared a look that Jaime didn’t understand, but they seemed less tense than before. A little bit of truth threaded through a lie always helped with that. 

“You both look exhausted,” Lina said gently. Despite the crossbow, Jaime could tell that she was the softer of the two, and easier swayed to empathy. “If you wish to rest before continuing your journey, you’re welcome to sleep in our guest quarters. I’m afraid it’s not much, but we try to keep to ourselves out here and don’t get many visitors.”

Brienne thanked Lina and they finished their meal mostly in silence. Jaime was curious now, he hadn’t given thought to why two women would want to live all the way out here, but Lina’s admission that they kept to themselves had made him wonder.

  
  
  
  
  
  


 

 

Jaime catches up with her outside in the courtyard. Mist eddies around their cloaks, and as the hours drain away to morning Brienne can feel that it will worsen; the castle will be shrouded in it.

“Ser Brienne,” he says, and the title makes her think, as it always does, of his shifting grip on his sword; the heaviness of his gaze as the room around them distilled to the words he was saying only for her to hear. 

“Ser Jaime.”

“I’m sorry about this morning. I forgot myself for a moment and didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Cersei is your family,” Brienne says, his sister’s name sounding strange in her mouth. She doesn't want to talk about this, but knows it has to be said.

Jaime shakes his head, his brow creased. “I severed ties with her when I came north. I meant what I said, Brienne. I have no plans to return to her. Arya can cross the last Lannister off her list if she wishes, I won’t stop her.”

Brienne looks at him, wreathed in mist, his eyes shining with something she refuses to name. This time, she thinks she could believe him.

“Will you come to bed?” she asks, and her voice only wavers on the edge of shy.

Jaime takes one of her hands, kisses it, and nods.

“Soon. I need... a moment.”

As he walks away Brienne wonders what he means to do, but then she sees the outline of Tyrion in the doorway above the stables. He is leaving to join the Dragon Queen, she knows, and she only hopes that he doesn't convince Jaime to join him.

  
  
  
  
  
  


 

 

The guest quarters weren’t much, it was true, but they were clean and dry and most importantly, they featured a bed.  

There wasn’t even an argument about it. As Brienne lay awkwardly down on one side of the bed, Jaime went to the other, both of them trying to leave as much room between them as possible.

It felt almost holy to lie on the thick nest of straw and furs, with a pillow under his head.  He was so happy about it he quite forgot that Brienne was irritated by his very presence, and that he was irritated by her, and started musing out loud about their puzzling hosts.

“Do you think they murdered their husbands and escaped together?”

No response. He wondered if Brienne had fallen asleep already.

“Do you think they were betrothed to evil men and chose to hide out in the woods in the hopes they wouldn’t be found?”

“Do you think,” Brienne asked, her voice tired, “That they got so sick of the man they were travelling with they smothered him to death with his own pillow for a moment of peace?” 

“No, they probably--”

Jaime’s retort was cut short by an odd, loud noise from the room they’d eaten their meal in. Brienne shot upright next to him, and he could feel her hand searching around between them. Her hand found his, briefly, before she snatched it away as though burned. 

Jaime felt a jolt of something go through him at her touch, but chose to ignore it.

“What are you--are you looking for your  _ sword _ ?”

“I’ve slept next to my sword since we left the Stark camp, Kingslayer, it’s a habit,” she said, snappish. She was leaning almost across him, though, to try and listen for any more noise on the other side of the door.

“And where did you have it while you slept  _ before _ that, my lady?” Jaime couldn’t help but ask, feeling very much as though she wasn’t telling him something.

Her hand slapped over his mouth, then, silencing him. He could have fought, but when he heard low voices not far from their door he couldn’t help but try to listen too.

Arlis and Lina were talking too quietly for either of them to make out any words, so with surprising agility, Brienne crept silently out of the bed and to the door. She pressed her ear against it, and Jaime could just make her out in the dim light of the candle still burning at their bedside. 

After a few moments, Brienne shook her head and grumbled.

“They’ve gone to their room, I heard a door shut nearby.”

“You didn’t hear  _ anything _ ?” Jaime asked. He was concerned to note that his heart was beating quickly in his chest, that he could taste the heat of it in the back of his mouth.

“No… or… no. It was hard to hear any of their whispers, but I could have sworn they were talking about a  _ bird _ .”

Jaime couldn’t begin to think what that meant.

“Do you think we’re safe here?” he asked, not being able to tell himself.

Brienne climbed back into the bed next to him and blew out their dying candle.

“No, but we aren’t safe anywhere.”

With that, she lay back down, and Jaime felt it prudent to assume they weren’t going to make any kind of escape tonight.

He lay down too, though it was with considerably less self-assurance. It was dark, darker than Jaime could remember without firelight or the wide open sky tossed out above them. Ironically, after all the complaints of not wanting to sleep on the ground anymore, he now couldn’t find a way to close his eyes and rest.

The house and its occupants were making him uneasy, and while Brienne was a solid reassuring mass next to him, he couldn’t shake the sense of unrest that had settled around their bed. 

  
  
  
  
  


 

 

“Gods it’s cold out there. Not to mention wet. And cold.”

Jaime shuts the door heavily behind him and bolts it, the action decisive. Brienne tries not to read into what it might mean .

His beard, already flecked with grey, now snarls around his jaw looking almost like teeth from the frosted white of snow. When he smiles at her she can see his real teeth, shiny in the firelight. She likes the way they gleam.

_ Wolf _ , she thinks, unbidden.  _ That is the way he has learned to look at me _ . 

He’s always been too comfortable with her. Even back when he was so quick to jeer and call her ugly he was just as quick to fill the space around her with his body, never deterred by her sword or lack of enthusiasm.  _ Abhorrent _ , that’s what she used to call him.  _ Agitating _ , like he was a flea biting at her skin.

Now she looks at him and he’s taking off his over-shirt in her chambers --  _ their _ chambers, Pod had referred to them the other morning -- like he’s been with her all his life. He folds the shirt over a chair and she admires the way practiced way he does it; the way he has learned to live with the loss of his hand.

They’ve never talked about it. Brienne has never been able to look at that hunk of metal without thinking about what it means, but they’ve never talked about it.

Jaime unbuckles the straps that keep the hand attached to his stump and lets it drop heavily to the table. He was self-conscious about it the first time he took it off while they were alone together, as though she hasn’t seen that stump at every stage of its evolution; as though she isn’t responsible for its existence. 

“Does it ever hurt, still?” she asks tentatively. 

He sits down at the table opposite her, pouring a cup of wine for them both. 

There is something about him in this orange light that makes a fear stir in her. Not the fighting kind, but the same kind that stirred when he first came drunkenly into her room after the battle. When she touched the laces of his shirt and she could feel his heart beating under his skin.

“No. It never hurts. But sometimes for a moment it feels like the hand is still there. Like a memory.”

She watches the muscles in his forearm clench the way they do when a hand makes a fist. 

“It’s not for you to worry about, Brienne,” he says, and she knows he means it.

She goes back to her letter, finishes the thoughts she’d been writing to her aging father. Sealing it with deep blue wax, she sets it aside. Jaime is watching her. 

“We should play a game,” he says.

Games have never ended well for Brienne, historically. A lot of rat-and-cat games in her youth ended with Brienne hiding alone in a larder, no one having bothered to find her until hours later. 

“An  _ interesting _ game,” he clarifies without prompting, as though this is supposed to make her feel better.

“What… game?” she asks. He can sense her hesitation and something in him softens, becomes protective. She doesn’t need to tell him that children can be cruel. 

“You don’t have to get up,” he says. He gets up himself, and rummages through the drawers where he’s put his clothes and sundries. She’d forgotten he did that. 

Jaime comes back to the table with a stack of well-worn playing cards -- she can see the faces of the dragon, the septa, an iron axe. She watches as he cuts them; shuffles them awkwardly with his one hand. She watches as they go face down, and she watches as he pushes them towards her. She has been watching him for years.

“You take three cards,” he says, a smile skirting around the edges of his mouth. “And then you give them to me. No peeking.”

She does as he says with the cards -- just picks them off the top, her heart beating wilder than it should for such a simple task -- and passes them over. His hand is warm where it meets hers, and she curses herself as she feels a blush. How he manages, after all this time, to make her do that, she will never know. Ass.

“Now, I look at your cards,” his gaze flicks quickly towards her before he makes a show of studying the cards up close. She rolls her eyes, and her heart calms. She can handle him like this, when he’s being airy and foolish. It’s when his eyes start to glitter like the edges of a flame that she starts to worry.

“Is this a difficult game?” she asks haughtily, “Because you seem to be struggling already.”

He grins -- a real, shining grin -- and chuckles at her before spreading out her cards face-down on the table in front of him. They’re all three in a row, and he just leaves them sitting there.

“And now, you tell me which card  _ you _ think is the queen.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it,” he says, imitating her voice.

“What if I choose wrong?”

“Then you take off one item of clothing.”

He leans back in his chair and for an unwavering, lucid moment he is every bit a magnificent Lannister lion. Brienne swallows, hard. She shouldn’t want so much to sit here and be his prey.

“What a stupid game,” she says, voice on the cusp of shaking.

Jaime shrugs. “Suit yourself. We could always get Tyrion back in here to play the truth game; though I might be right in saying you’ll have a few less things to drink about this time?”

Mad that his words have needled under her skin, Brienne takes a sip from her cup -- just to prove she doesn’t care about any drinking games -- and huffs out a sigh.

“I didn’t say I wasn’t going to play, just that it  _ is _ a stupid game.”

“You’re right, it’s a stupid game. Now, pick the queen.”

She doesn’t pick the queen. It’s a jester, instead, the green one, and his stupid lolling tongue sticks out at her like a personal jape at her expense.

Jaime conceals his glee fairly well when Brienne reaches down and takes off a sock, dropping it awkwardly on the ground. People enjoy this game? Perhaps it goes better further south, when it’s summer time, and the people one play with aren’t sitting on the other side of the table with their eyes darker than dragonglass. She shifts in her seat; neck warm from Jaime’s gaze. He’s going to kiss her soon, she can feel it. 

“I was hoping for the shirt, but that will do for now,” he says. 

Brienne wishes she’d thrown the sock at him instead, and pushes the stack of cards back towards him. “Now you pick.”

Unfortunately, when she asks him which card the dragon is, Jaime chooses correctly.

When he grins at her, she knows he’s neglected to explain another part of the game.

“Lose the other one, then,” he says in a low voice, and gestures at the foot she still wears a sock on. Brienne’s whole body floods with heat, and she hates that it’s more from arousal than anger. 

It keeps on like this -- Brienne is very bad at picking cards, and Jaime is so much better that she’s sure he must be cheating somehow. He’s only picked wrong once, and even though she’s seen it now, up close, the action of him taking off his shirt is one that makes her mouth go dry. The scrub of hair on his chest, the ribs beneath -- she is desperate to touch him again. The thought embarrasses her. Women are not meant to be so wanton.

He’s looking at her again; waiting for her to pick a card. If she’s wrong, only her undershirt and trousers are left, and she doesn’t know which one will make her blush more to take off.

“I have seen it all before, you know,” Jaime says, but it doesn’t seem like he’s teasing her.

“But that’s--it’s not the same… circumstances,” she replies. It’s not in the giddy heat before fucking, where everything is hazy and heightened, they’re just two people alone in a room with their flaws, and she is afraid of it.

“I don’t mean here,” Jaime says, running a finger across a grain in the table wood. “In the baths, at Harrenhal.”

Brienne remembers that; the rush of water off her body as she stood ready to fight him with her bare hands, even naked and half-dead as they were.

“You were very… taut.”

Brienne can’t manage to contain her snort of laughter.

“And defiant.”

She rolls her eyes, and then Jaime’s expression changes.

“You looked…” he swallows, his eyes darting away from her, then back. “You looked like a god.”

She would think about moving to kiss him but Jaime is already up and launching himself across the table at her, cards scattering like birds into flight. It’s dizzying when he kisses her, wild like their first but deeper with the ease of practice. Brienne gasps into his mouth, brimming with lust and nerves and heat, her hand coming up to run through the hair at the back of his neck.

The first time Jaime had touched her she wanted to be timid; she was buzzing with fear, alive with it, like she was about to be let in on a secret.

But when he lays her on the bed and puts his mouth on her now, his fingers marking the skin of her thigh, she entirely forgets. She forgets that sound might echo off stone and crowds herself against the nick of his teeth; she forgets to breathe, then remembers; cries out; holds his body stickily against her as he climbs his way back to her face.

After, in the light of the dying fire, Jaime thumbs a weathered hand over the pale of her hip; dark against milky white. 

“Tell me something,” he says. The way he looks at her makes her want to cover her face with her hands.

“About what?” she asks instead.

“Anything. The first man you killed. The first man you wanted to lie with. The first time you felt the sun burn you after a long winter. You hate to tell me anything I might actually want to hear.”

Jaime’s breath is warm where it coasts over her shoulder, thumb still running laps over her hipbone. Her blood sings under her skin. It _is_ hard for her to tell him the nicer things, even if she does want to. It’s easier when they’re insulting each other, the rhythm of it soothing the way swordfighting is. 

Then she does think of something. 

“When we stayed with those two women, on the road. When we slept together--”

Brienne realises her mistake when Jaime grins at her.

“When we shared a bed,” she says, correcting herself. Jaime reaches for her hand where it rests on her stomach. “It was--it was the first time you called me ‘my lady’ instead of an insult.”

“You kept track of that?” he asks, surprised.

Brienne doesn’t know how to explain -- a life littered with cruel words, some clever, most not... what she keeps track of aren’t the things that hurt; it’s the things that don’t. She watches as Jaime twines their fingers together.

“Before Renly… it was rare. To hear it genuinely said. Besides, I’m no lady.”

“You are to me,” Jaime says.

He shifts closer to her, takes a moment to graze his teeth over the jut of her shoulder.

“Tell me something else. Tell me your secrets,” he says, and something in her burns white hot, twisting in her belly and around her ears. The gravelly, teasing way he says it makes her want to physically writhe under her furs, such is the tenderness of it. Words only for her, said the way words might be said to a willowy beauty like Lady Sansa or a tempestuous queen like Cersei. 

“I don’t have any more secrets from you,” she says. It is foolish for her to speak so vulnerably; she’s still certain her open heart is only going to end up leaving her as flayed as House Bolton’s gruesome sigil in the end. But she can’t stop herself, looking at his eyes softening amidst his wildish hair she wants to tell him anything that will keep that look on his face. “You’ve learned them all.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> when i was writing this i was like to kat what's the westeros version of strip poker and we spent i kid you not a fucking hour trying to find out if these assholes do anything normal like play card games and guess what, we came up totally dead outta gas EMPTY so thanks for nothing george really really martin how about putting some of that shit in your long ass books


	4. part iv

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the maddest lie that game of thrones ever told is that the most handsome man in westeros and the tallest lady ever built just didn't get noticed for fully half a season of the show while they fucked around in the riverlands or wherever and THAT, folks, is. well. that
> 
> anyway, have some more fanfiction

Brienne doesn’t talk anymore to Jaime of leaving, until a week after Tyrion sets out for Kings Landing and Jaime asks her to give him a haircut. 

She’s uncertain it’s a good idea.

“You’ll do fine; you love the idea of being able to maim me with scissors if I talk too much.”

Brienne rolls her eyes, but when she fixes on the shaggy crop of hair at the nape of Jaime’s neck, her bottom lip sucks between her teeth in concern. 

“You would be better to ask a septa -- or even  _ Podrick _ \-- than me, Jaime. I’m certain I can’t cut it evenly.”

His name still sounds naked without the title, but he’s asked her enough to stop calling him  _ ser _ that she feels she has to get used to saying it. 

“I want you to do it,” Jaime says, shrugging.

He hands her a pair of scissors and sits in one of the chairs around their little table, and waits. Smugly. He’s so sure she’s going to do as he says that Brienne has half a mind to leave the room without uttering another word. 

But Jaime asks so little of her, in truth, that he’s right. She will do as he says.

Picking up the scissors, Brienne runs her other hand through his hair where she finds threads of grey and brown and golden sunlight.

“I think Tyrion cut my hair once,” Jaime says thoughtfully. “If I recall, he was dreadful; left half my hair on the floor and the other half on just one side of my head.”

“Seven hells, don’t tell me that,” Brienne says in horror, her scissors open around a chunk of hair.

“I said it to make you feel better!” Jaime laughs.

Her belly flutters with wings at his gentle mirth, and then she calms. It’s  _ Jaime _ , it’s just Jaime and he’s not going to care if the back of his neck is a little colder on one side than the other. She takes in a breath, lets it fill her lungs, and then closes the scissors. The cut hairs fall like snow across Jaime’s shoulder, and she brushes them away. It’s simpler than she made it out to be, and she feels bolder for it.

“Can I ask you something?” she wonders to the back of his head, knowing there is no good time to ask what she wants, but needing to anyway.

“You can ask me anything.”

“What did you and Tyrion discuss the night before he left?”

She keeps cutting, only half an inch or so at a time, but steady, as she waits for Jaime to answer. She tries not to look at anything but his hair, but she can see the muscles in his neck are tensed as he treads over what to say in his mind. 

“Well, we talked about you,” Jaime says. 

Brienne feels her cheeks warm.

“We talked about whether or not I should return South with him, and I won’t lie to you -- I did consider it,” Jaime turns to glance up at her, “But I found not long after that I had quite a good reason to stay.”

She stops cutting to frown, not following what Jaime is saying.

“Cersei sent Bronn here to kill me," he clarifies. "It wasn’t very clever; I’m honestly disappointed -- she might be losing her edge.”

Brienne doesn’t know what to say. 

“Are you still in danger?”

“Not with you,” Jaime says, as though it’s as simple as that.

Walking around the chair, Brienne takes Jaime’s chin in her fingers and tilts his head so he can’t look at her face. She doesn’t want him to look at her so earnestly when she still doesn’t have an answer to her biggest question.

“What happens if I don’t want to stay in Winterfell?” she asks.

Jaime shrugs.

“Where do you want to go? If Sansa gave you leave, would we stay in the North? Because not to insult your Lady’s home but it _ is _ threatening to give me frostbite so bad I lose my other hand.”

“Well you know  _ you’re _ free to go,” Brienne says, and it’s meant to come out as purely teasing. Unfortunately, her tone must go amiss because Jaime’s face falls like she’s struck him.

Her grip on his chin falters.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean--that came out not as I intended.”

“It’s all right, I know what you meant,” Jaime says, and Brienne is grateful, again, that he always seems to know what she means. 

She goes back to trimming the hair at the sides of his face, but momentarily stops again.

“Did you say ‘we’?” she asks, only just catching on to the words Jaime had used.

For a moment Jaime says nothing, but she could swear that even in this dim light, he is blushing.

“Where would I go alone, Brienne?” he asks eventually. “Even if the Dragon Queen defeats my sister and brings us peace? I don’t wish to be my father’s heir; after all the mud it’s been dragged through it seems the best thing for the Lannister name would be for it to die a quiet death.”

It becomes apparent to Brienne, in a way that it wasn’t before, that Jaime has nothing left to go home to. He’s right -- even if Kings Landing is taken without bloodshed, the city isn’t his. Tyrion is his only family now that Cersei has sent their relationship up in flames, and his loyalty is to Daenerys Targaryen.

She doesn’t know who has Jaime’s loyalty. Except, maybe, her.

“The other night when I was writing that letter -- it was to my father. He is not in good health and I was replying to a raven he sent asking me to visit him,” Brienne says, and it’s not an invitation but it isn’t not one either. She can’t bring herself to ask, even though his yes is almost a certainty. Her chest still feels tight with anxiety, every string of sinew taut as an archer’s bow. She is far too used to disappointment.

“I sailed past Tarth on my way to Dorne,” Jaime says. “I thought of you.”

Brienne’s heart goes wet-soft and then hot, filling with blood and love and something that feels canny and like  _ thirst _ . She scratches her fingers over Jaime’s beard, feels the hard jut of his jaw beneath, then bends down and kisses him. It’s a promise, and a thank you, and tastes like hope.

“If you’re coming to Tarth, then,” she says, “You’re going to have to get a proper haircut.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Jaime woke, grinding back into the world, it took him a moment to realise where he was. When he was oriented and surer of his own thoughts, he was surprised to learn that he had actually fallen asleep at all. 

It was not recognisably morning. Out the small window, Jaime could see an iron-grey sky that could be deepening into dawn or the ash of dusk, he couldn’t tell. They could have slept for minutes, but it might have been days, too. 

Next to him, Brienne appeared asleep but her breathing was almost fitful -- dreaming, maybe. Or fighting against consciousness. Jaime didn’t know if she slept on the road. He barely did, his body wolf-sharp and waiting for the slightest strange sound on the air until it was time to drag themselves on their way again. 

Since their first fraught days together, Jaime had lost the sting of longing that needled at him -- he had wanted to be caught by anyone even distantly loyal to his family, would have fallen to his knees at any sign of a lion banner. But after that… it wasn’t that he didn’t want to return home, he did, desperately. It was just that now he knew he wanted Brienne to be the one to get him there. She was, beyond all logic, true to her word and had no agenda for him other than the one she told him about: she’d sworn an oath to Lady Catelyn to exchange him in Kings Landing for the two young Stark girls.

Brienne didn’t seem to know what an ulterior motive _was_ , let alone want one for herself. Jaime was drawn to that.

Cersei was obsessed with getting under the skin of politics, sinking her canines right into it. All she was ever after was _the throne_ . With her there were plots and scorn and disdain -- even for him; especially for him, the stupidest Lannister -- it tired him. Brienne didn’t care about that. She cared about having honour and using a sword and learning her way through the spines of the mountains around them. He didn’t _like_ her, but she was _different_.

A slithering, restless sound from the room beyond made Jaime tense and Brienne stir next to him. 

Jaime had been thinking it over, and was loathe to say out loud what he feared they had heard the night before. 

But he knew what a body hitting the ground sounded like. He’d been responsible for making that sound many times over. He was certain in the bones of himself that they had heard it.

“You slept,” Brienne said from beside him, groggy. 

“You did too,” Jaime replied, not sure if she was mocking him or not.

“You never sleep.”

He didn’t know that Brienne had paid attention to the way he rattled through their nights together. But then, he supposed, she probably didn’t know that he had paid attention to her, either. 

She sat up beside him, listening for Arlis and Lina. There were noises coming from the outer room, low voices and a boiling pot, maybe; the sounds of breakfast and waking. Despite the wariness he had for the two women Jaime felt a hollow pang. Servants made him breakfast, and the rare times he ate it with Tyrion or Cersei it wasn’t satisfying or familial. He had never even seen the kitchens of Kings Landing, let alone made his own breakfast in them. 

It was too domestic a wish to ever be said out loud -- the foolishness of wanting somewhere of his own to live, not a castle but somewhere that Cersei would surely consider a hovel, just because it would be simple, quiet -- but sometimes he wanted it all the same.

“What are we going to do?” Jaime asked in a low voice. “Do we confront them about the noise we heard?”

Brienne’s blue eyes regarded him with an expression he couldn’t decipher.

“We need to get out of here peacefully,” she said finally. “I don’t know what that looks like for you, given that you have not been peaceful about anything since we met, but for me it means letting those women believe I heard nothing out of the ordinary last night.”

So she believed the same. There was a body to be found in this place, and no way for them to know if it was friend or foe.

“I will take your lead, my lady,” Jaime said, nearly astonished to find those words coming out of his own mouth.

“I don’t believe that for a moment,” Brienne said, not a fleck of spirit in her voice at all as she swept the furs of their bed back and stood up. She really did tower over most of the world, Jaime thought. He wasn’t going to admit he was in awe of it, because she was a great lumbering oaf who hated the sight of him.

But he was. 

In awe.

Keeping his face neutral, Jaime followed Brienne out the door and into the kitchen area, the muffled breakfast-sounds now crisp and edifying. Meat sizzled on a hot grate over the fire, and Arlis sat hunched over a mug of tea at their table. Lina smiled at them and it was real, it sat warm in her eyes as she gestured to a pot near the fire. 

“You’ve made it back to the living,” she said, “Have some tea.”

Jaime had heard from Tyrion enough times that poison was a woman’s weapon, but Brienne was already walking towards the pot and pouring a mug for both of them. Her hands shook only slightly.

“Did you sleep comfortably?” Arlis asked, her voice gruff. 

“Yes, my lady, if it please you,” Jaime said. “We slept almost immediately after we laid our heads.”

He took one of the mugs of tea from Brienne and the look in her eyes was fiery. It was obvious he’d said the wrong thing. 

The air in the room seemed to go cold; all sound reducing down to a simmer.

“So you heard we had a visitor in the dark,” Lina said.

“We heard nothing, my lady,” Brienne replied, and even to Jaime’s ears she sounded sure. 

Arlis snorted into her tea. “That may very well be the case, but it doesn’t change that we had to get rid of them, and that you should be grateful we did,” she said, and Lina nodded.

“We don’t like birdsong around here.”

Something familiar prickled in Jaime’s gut when Lina said _bird_ , but he was sure it couldn’t be true. They couldn’t know who he was, or they wouldn’t have let him live through the night. 

Brienne just looked at him, knowing she was missing something. Hoping it was imperceptible to the two women, Jaime shook his head. 

“We are grateful to you both,” Jaime said quickly, “for everything.”

“We only hope there’s some way we can repay you,” Brienne agreed.

Arlis and Lina looked at each other.

“If you want to repay us, gather your things and be on your way,” Arlis said, her voice thorny and crackling with purpose. 

“The longer you stay the more danger you put us all in,” Lina added, and Jaime wondered how they had all so quickly come to be talking about the same thing. His heart had started trying to climb out of his mouth with every passing second; he was certain they were running out of time to get out of this with their lives. 

“Come then, my… love,” Brienne said, faltering on the word. New ground for her tongue to tread upon, he supposed. Arlis and Lina didn’t seem to notice her hesitation, though, or they didn’t care. Lina thrust a small bag into Brienne’s hands.

“It’s a poultice for your shoulder, and tincture for his wound,” she said, jerking a thumb in Jaime’s direction. 

She turned, her eyes wood-hazel and bright, to him. “Do not let it get infected.”

Jaime nodded, and followed Brienne to the front door. He hated that his legs shook, the air feeling thick and soupy in his nose. But they stepped out without being shocked by a trap, or bags being thrown over their heads in capture.

Every step he took, Jaime felt more and more giddy, like they might just get away with it.

Then he heard Arlis speak.

“Lord Varys has spies in every crevice of Westeros,” she said to their backs, “You’d do well to remember that, Kingslayer.”

Blood, hot and singing, rushed through his veins. He and Brienne both turned back to the two women in the doorway, sure now that they must have a crossbow ready to burrow a bolt into both their chests.

But they held no weapons.

“Be careful out there,” was all Lina said.

Jaime and Brienne could do nothing but nod.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The news comes that Cersei is dead.

Brienne learns the details from Sansa, who tells her that the Red Keep was destroyed; that Daenerys sacked the city and laid her banners upon the walls like a conqueror. 

Those are the broad strokes of it. Sansa lowers her voice for the trickier parts. Brienne learns that not long after Daenerys took Kings Landing, she abandoned it; fled back to Meereen where she was a hero and not a tyrant. Back to a man who loved her instead of a man who never could, not the way she wanted. Jon Snow didn’t want a queen he wanted the North and the people in it; wanted it in the marrow of him the way a wolf wants prey. 

Sansa tells her with a tremor in her voice that she is to be Queen in the North, and a small council run by Tyrion will rule the South. Jon will go beyond the Wall with the free folk. For now, peace creeps through the Seven Kingdoms.

Brienne’s first thoughts after she hears  _ Cersei Lannister is dead _ are for Jaime. She wonders if he knows -- not just if he’s been told, but if he  _ knows _ , inside himself, that his twin is dead.

She finds him in the Godswood, his eyes fixed on the bloody face of the weirwood as its branches creak above him.

His eyes are rimmed red but he doesn’t look sad, exactly. She expected devastation -- whatever kind of monster Cersei might have been Jaime loved her, horns and scales and fury, and they were bonded together in ways she couldn’t begin to untangle.

But it’s not sadness, or at least it is not an unreachable, gasping sadness. There is relief in him as he reaches for her hand, and there is acceptance. Cersei was always going to die this way, angry and fighting and too young to be going into the ground.

“I always thought I would die with her,” Jaime says, reading her thoughts. His voice is scratchy and torn. 

“I’m glad you didn’t,” Brienne says. She is certain beyond a doubt that the very foundations of her would crumble if she lost Jaime now. At some point, she’s going to tell him that out loud.

“We’ll leave soon, won’t we?” he asks. 

“When the snows lessen,” Brienne says, and wonders if she means the weather, or something else.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the first time since he’d left the Stark camp, Jaime felt afraid for his life. He walked a few paces behind Brienne as they made their way back to the tree where they’d left their possessions, mulling furiously on their compromised position. 

“We shouldn’t leave them alive.”

“That’s what you said about the old man,” Brienne replied, but he could tell she was uneasy herself. 

“And I was right then, too. Regardless of what they did for us, they have plenty of reason to want me back in the hands of my enemies.  _ Most _ people do.”

Brienne, pulling their things out into the open, turned back to look at him stonily. There was fire brewing behind her eyes again. 

“Do you honestly believe yourself so infamous that the whole world cares about where you happen to be  _ right _ at this moment?”

He gave her a toothy grin, “Well, yes.”

“ _ Ugh _ .”

He watched Brienne put her armour back on, still struggling with her injured shoulder. Without even thinking, Jaime stepped forward and helped lift her breastplate back over her head. 

“What are you doing?” she snapped, stepping back from him and picking up his shackles off the ground.

“Trying to help you with your armour, idiot,” he snapped back, suddenly annoyed that he had lied so much to keep her safe back in that house. She didn’t have to be so bloody ungrateful all the time. It wasn’t like he was expecting a thank you, but a  _ moment _ without her hackles raised and teeth bared would have been nice. 

Brienne blinked at him, then the tension seemed to crawl out of her where it had holed up against his touch. Jaime felt his own shoulders slacken in kind -- he was not as ready as she to be bound by those heavy iron bars again just yet. 

“Thank you,” she said begrudgingly, and now that Jaime was desperate to keep her distracted, he set his fingers to fastening Brienne’s armour into place.

“You know,” he said, tilting his chin to look at her, “I didn’t give you enough credit back there, for your performance.”

Brienne wrinkled her nose. “I’m not a tourney horse; I wasn’t  _ performing _ .”

“Oh but you were,” Jaime said, sliding on one of her vambraces. He was all charm now, bristling with it, and he could see that Brienne’s hold on her facade was getting slippery. “You could take your place on stage in Braavos with that routine.”

Scoffing, Brienne held out her arm so he could fix the vambrace in place. Jaime let his hands linger, and let his weight rock forward, just a little. Just enough that he could feel her catch her breath, holding it tight in her throat.

“Didn’t you enjoy it, even a bit?” he asked, voice low. “The danger of it?”

Brienne’s gaze dropped to his mouth as he smiled slyly at her, sure and inviting. He was sure he could feel her leaning closer, her mouth parting just a fraction so he could see the threat of her teeth and the way the inside of her lip glistened. Suddenly he was unsure who was seducing who, and knew if she kept looking at him like that he was going to end up hard as rock and entirely on the wrong side of this situation.

But she didn’t stop, and Jaime found himself running his tongue along his bottom lip almost unconsciously, weight all coiled in the balls of his feet. If she didn’t move, he really was going to kiss her, this farce between them be damned. Brienne’s eyes glittered, bluer than the sea.

Then, out of nowhere, he felt the cold weight of iron around his wrists, and looked down to see Brienne snapping his manacles back into place.

“I have plenty of danger in my life already, Kingslayer,” she said, tired and sick of him once again. “I didn’t need you adding to it.”

Jaime watched as she put the rest of her armour on herself, paying him no mind at all. As he watched, something about her settled in him, unfurling soft and low.

If they didn't kill each other, Jaime was terrified that he and Brienne of Tarth were going to fall in love.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When the party from the South returns, Brienne and Jaime are helping Sansa distribute supplies to the outlying villages near Winterfell; replenishing diminished stores and making sure they can sow their crops as winter finally begins to thaw.

There is a clatter in the yard, and people gather like birds upon grain.

Jon Snow walks into the Great Hall looking broken and small, and then Tormund Giantsbane is thrusting himself through the crowd with a noise that sounds like the beginning of a roar. For a moment, Brienne is worried that Tormund will strike him, and her hand looks for the hilt of the sword she isn’t wearing.

But Tormund has no intention of harming Jon. When he reaches him, there is a second of stillness between them. The rest of the world gets spliced out and what’s left is just fire and snow; elements suspended in time.

Then, drawn like light to a star, Tormund gathers Jon to his chest and they are wrought into one silent creature of fur and sorrow. Brienne watches as Tormund’s hand cradles the back of Jon’s head, all deep murmurs and tight-armed comfort. Renly flits through her mind again, and she wonders how she ever thought his choices were to be reviled.

She looks to Jaime, reminded of a moment where she truly loathed him; her hand making a greasy fist in his hair as she stared him in the eye.  _ We don’t get to choose who we love _ .

He just shrugs at her, because he has always been the smartest when it comes to that.

Brienne waits for Jon to unspool from Tormund’s embrace and greet his sister. He throws a polite nod to Brienne, and she thinks he looks less haunted than the last time she saw him.

Jon tells the room what Brienne already knows -- that he is to go North, and he will settle beyond the wall and liaise with those still stationed at Castle Black. It sounds formal, but he looks at Tormund as he says it and they are already imagining being gone from here, not worried about what things look like beyond leaving Winterfell behind.

When he finishes, Brienne turns to Sansa.

“My Lady, there is no appropriate time to ask this, but I need your permission for something.”

Sansa’s eyes glint with knowing and glance towards Jaime, who is standing off to the side and trying to look inconspicuous.

“Whatever it is, Ser, you know my permission is granted.”

“I would like to travel to Tarth to visit with my father -- I’m not sure if I intend to be there for a while, or whether I long to return to the North, but--”

“When will you and Ser Jaime be leaving?” Sansa asks, cutting her off.

“I…” Brienne hadn’t considered that Sansa had assumed, just as Jaime had, that they would be leaving together. She looks back at Jaime himself, who dutifully pretends he hasn’t been listening. 

“As soon as things around here have… settled,” Brienne says, a blush on her cheeks. “I know that you’re very capable, and will make a great leader, but with such upheaval… I worry about you, still.” 

Sansa smiles at her, genuine and beatific and every bit a fledgling queen.

“You will always have a place here, Ser Brienne, if you should return. Know that, and make sure Ser Jaime knows that too.”

Brienne looks to Jaime again, who bows to Sansa with a careful reverence.

“I will take my leave, Your Grace,” Brienne says, and hopes Sansa knows how much she loves her. Sansa nods and pulls Brienne into a fierce hug, that is sad and joyful all at once. When they step back Sansa smiles again and her hair shimmers fire-red; a queen that Catelyn Stark would be proud of.

Jaime follows Brienne as they leave the hall, stepping out into the brilliant sunshine that has pierced through the scudding clouds and laid its ancient light across the courtyard of Winterfell.

So it isn’t over. Claims will come for the throne -- all of them, iron and snow and even the one Daenerys has taken back in Meereen. Maybe it will never be over -- maybe they will die in battle; maybe they will be lost to the wind on a ship at sea, sunk to the kelp and rocks below. Maybe they will find that the weather never fairs. 

But Brienne can feel it, resting heavy on her chest, as she looks at Jaime. A sureness, steady and bright. It doesn’t have a name, but it is a beast as earthy and carnal as the one that resides between Tormund and Sansa’s wild-kissed brother Jon Snow.

She knows they have something that will bind them together like scar-flesh, like the knitted up wounds they both wear on their skin. She knows it like meat and fibre and the white of their bones.

 

She knows that there is war, there is the throne, and then there is Jaime Lannister. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well thats it. that's the end, thanks very much for reading i wasn't even SUPPOSED to write this but! am i now considering writing a much longer semi follow up fic where jaime and brienne have to go beyond the wall for some reason and they run into jon and tormund who are building themselves a cute scandinavian-style house to live in with their son ghost? maybe!! i shouldn't. but maybe!!! i'm tired


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